The Film Comment Podcast: Fassbinder’s Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day

Did the golden age of television already happen? This episode of the podcast makes the case that it has—in 1970s Germany, courtesy of the one and only R.W. Fassbinder. In her feature in the May/June issue, Aliza Ma tackles Fassbinder’s recently restored and rediscovered Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, the nearly eight-hour series the auteur wrote and shot at a crucial moment in his career.The ensemble story involves the friends and family of a worker in a machine parts factory as he slowly mobilizes colleagues against the management. Ma writes: “With Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, Fassbinder channels his unique capacity for self-interrogation and curiosity about new social modes of existence into mass media, proving—at least for five episodes—that it is possible to create popular entertainment that manages to be multifaceted, provocative, and meaningful.” Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Ma, head of programming at Metrograph, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to bask in the complexities and pleasures of this newly essential addition to the Fassbinder oeuvre.